Your Name and Title: Amy Eguchi, Associate Professor of Education
School or Organization Name: Bloomfield College/RoboCup Federation
Co-Presenter Name(s):
Area of the World from Which You Will Present: New York, NY, USA
Language in Which You Will Present: English (can translate in Japanese, and possibly other languages, Just let me know ahead of time!)
Target Audience(s): Teachers, students, educators in general
Short Session Description (one line): Promoting Global STEM through Educational Robotics Competition (RoboCupJunior)
Full Session Description (as long as you would like):
Are you looking for an opportunity for students to work collaboratively with people from around the world on real-world problems while fostering global competency and promote Global STEM learning? Join RoboCupJunior educational robotics initiative. RoboCupJunior is an educational robotics competition promoting global collaboration among participating students. There are students from more than 40 countries participating in the initiative. Educational robotics is a learning tool that promotes the skills for collaboration and teamwork among students (Eguchi, 2007a, 2007b; Miller, Nourbakhsh, & Sigwart, 2008) through hands-on learning. RoboCupJunior (RCJ) is an educational robotics initiative that provides unique learning opportunities for young students up to 19 years old. First, its goals remain approximately the same from one year to the next, providing a scaffolded learning environment in which students continuously develop and sophisticate their solutions as they grow and expand their skills and knowledge. Second, it focuses more on education than competition. Although the goals remain the same each year, the rules are improved every year through intensive discussions among the technical committee members to not only improve the competition itself but also to improve the learning experience that participating students can have. Third, its challenges, called leagues, use topics – soccer, rescue and dance – that are familiar to students to attract and motivate them into educational robotics. All three Junior leagues emphasize both cooperative and collaborative nature of design, programming and building in a team setting (Sklar, Eguchi, & Johnson, 2002).
In this session, you will learn what RoboCupJunior is about, various challenges it provides from the entry to advanced levels, and how you can take part in the initiative. In addition, the participants can contribute to discussions on developing creative ways to promote more Global STEM projects through RoboCupJunior.
References:
Eguchi, Amy. (2007a). Educational Robotics for Elementary School Classroom. Paper presented at the Society for Information Technology and Education (SITE), San Antonio, TX.
Eguchi, Amy. (2007b). Educational Robotics for Undergraduate Freshmen. Paper presented at the Proceedings of World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications, Vancouver, Canada.
Miller, David P., Nourbakhsh, Illah R., & Sigwart, Roland. (2008). Robots for Education. In B. Siciliano & O. Khatib (Eds.), Springer Handbook of Rootics (pp. p. 1283 - 1301). New York, NY: Springer-Verlag New York, LLC.
Sklar, Elizabeth, Eguchi, Amy, & Johnson, Jeffrey. (2002). Children's learning from Team Robotics: RoboCupJunior 2001. Proceedings of RoboCup-2002: Robot Soccer World Cup VI.
Websites / URLs Associated with Your Session: http://robocupjunior.org, http://robocupjunior.us, http://www.robocupjunior.org.au, http://www.robocup.org
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